Picture This
I met Frank after one rigorous general ‘cds’ meeting; everything in this country resembles struggle. We were to line up according to our code numbers to sign the attendance register, and trust us…
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The wonderful lack of consistency with covers in gaming
Ha… how I envy the movie and music industries. Album covers? Pretty much universally square through the ages, be it CDs or Vinyls. Cinema posters? While they’ve evolved and dimensions vary from country to country they still pretty much fit the classic ‘poster’ format.
Meanwhile in gaming…
Of course, it’s a silly mention considering the ever changing formats in gaming, but it nonetheless proves a bit problematic when designing a database for the modern age, desktop or mobile… it looks like a mess.
With every game page comes a cover, which is also the first thing that captures your eye. Since we’re working on a redesign for IGDB, this ended up being a big concern. It makes displaying games in a grid (lists features for example), harder to work with.
To simply put it; there is no way of unifying it all unless ‘cheating’ by remaking formatted covers, a neat 3:4 ratio is quite common in many websites for example, but while it is probably okay to turn a Steam header into a poster, it gets more complicated for mobile games that often only rely on a phone icon or very old retro games where good assets are hard to come by, yet alone the actual original cover. Then there’s also the slight issue of volume, having well over 100K game pages to go through…
There is of course the option of forgoing covers altogether to rely on game screenshots which is another popular option for gaming sites, but that isn’t an option when being a database with the goal of documenting games. 😉
The solution here may lie in increasing the stored data and cover ALL the format and regional box arts available. Custom covers coupled with clever algorithm cropping could help unify game covers. Covers as a whole would still differ from system to system, but maybe that is just a quirk for gaming to be accepted ;) in any case more data would certainly offer more options!
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